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Early ancestors of humankind may have taken to bipedalism for any number of reasons, but a gorilla at the Philadelphia Zoo recently found a new one: cleaner food:

When Louis has his hands full of tomatoes or other snacks, he walks upright like a human to keep food and hands clean, rather than the typical gorilla stance of leaning forward on his knuckles.

This suggests a possible interesting path in evolution. Early ancestors of humanity may have chosen bipedalism for the ability to carry food and other objects, marking a transition to the tool-making era of our forebears.

I am told that killing a human individual is more difficult than people anticipate, at least. It takes more effort than expected, the sounds and smells are worse, and the cleanup is far more involved, at least according to local officers who track down first-time murderers. But killing off a whole ethnic group might be even easier.

It seems like something that should be done in some old-fashioned manner, like the British with their Boer concentration camps, the open pit executions in Eastern Europe, or the Communists starving whole regions into submission. In reality, it is more like hacking a computer: you just have to hack minds and lead them, in pursuit of some illusion, over a cliff and to their deaths.

We can be hacked through mental viruses, or even just deceptive language, because humans have programmable minds that respond more intensely to symbolic data than to direction perception of their surroundings, mainly because the latter requires much effort:

Book One, first verse, of the Book of John in the New Testament says cryptically: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” This has baffled Biblical scholars, but I interpret it as follows: Until there was speech, the human beast could have no religion, and consequently no God. In the beginning was the Word. Speech gave the beast its first ability to ask questions, and undoubtedly one of the first expressed his sudden but insatiable anxiety as to how he got here and what this agonizing struggle called life is all about. To this day, the beast needs, can’t live without, some explanation as the basis of whatever status he may think he possesses. For that reason, extraordinary individuals have been able to change history with their words alone, without the assistance of followers, money, or politicians.

This means that if you find a way to put into people’s heads that their demise is the right thing to do, or provides the best life possible for them, they will follow their doom as if it were their salvation. This reminds us of a great metaphor but also great hoax, the parable of the lemming, in which we were programmed to think ill of a species of small rodents purely by media manipulation:

So why is the myth of mass lemming suicide so widely believed? For one, it provides an irresistible metaphor for human behavior. Someone who blindly follows a crowd—maybe even toward catastrophe—is called a lemming. Over the past century, the myth has been invoked to express modern anxieties about how individuality could be submerged and destroyed by mass phenomena, such as political movements or consumer culture.

But the biggest reason the myth endures? Deliberate fraud. For the 1958 Disney nature film White Wilderness, filmmakers eager for dramatic footage staged a lemming death plunge, pushing dozens of lemmings off a cliff while cameras were rolling. The images—shocking at the time for what they seemed to show about the cruelty of nature and shocking now for what they actually show about the cruelty of humans—convinced several generations of moviegoers that these little rodents do, in fact, possess a bizarre instinct to destroy themselves.

When you think about the news media or entertainment, most of what it shows us is people who are engaging in self-destructive behavior and having fun or at least seeming important for doing so. And there is no mention of the cliff, as if it did not exist at all.

At one point, and suddenly changing the subject, Will asked me why I think that anti-Semitism exists. I said that this is a complex issue, and that a better way to put it might be to ask why hostility toward Jews has persisted over so many centuries, and in so many different cultures.

I went on to say that I largely agreed with what Theodor Herzl, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, had written (in The Jewish State) on this issue. I mentioned that Herzl, along with many others, often referred to the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in society as “the Jewish question.”

Having approached this situation from the opposite direction, namely “what data patterns can we infer that might prevent genocide?,” I found this interesting, and not only because Herzl is one of my heroes. Herzl articulated one of those rare arguments that is not against another race, but against the concept of diversity itself, following in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle.

In Herzl’s view, the cause of anti-Semitism was diversity itself, or the fact that a foreign population within an ethnically-consistent population would stand out and become a scapegoat. He wrote about this after witnessing The Dreyfuss Affair and analyzing the psychology of the crowds, and his ideas led to the formation of modern (post-diaspora) Israel:

Herzl first encountered the anti-Semitism that would shape his life and the fate of the Jews in the twentieth century while studying at the University of Vienna (1882). Later, during his stay in Paris as a journalist, he was brought face-to-face with the problem. At the time, he regarded the Jewish problem as a social issue and wrote a drama, The Ghetto (1894), in which assimilation and conversion are rejected as solutions.

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was unjustly accused of treason, mainly because of the prevailing anti-Semitic atmosphere. Herzl witnessed mobs shouting “Death to the Jews” in France, the home of the French Revolution, and resolved that there was only one solution: the mass immigration of Jews to a land that they could call their own. Thus, the Dreyfus Case became one of the determinants in the genesis of Political Zionism.

Herzl concluded that anti-Semitism was a stable and immutable factor in human society, which assimilation did not solve. He mulled over the idea of Jewish sovereignty, and, despite ridicule from Jewish leaders, published Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State, 1896). Herzl argued that the essence of the Jewish problem was not individual but national. He declared that the Jews could gain acceptance in the world only if they ceased being a national anomaly. The Jews are one people, he said, and their plight could be transformed into a positive force by the establishment of a Jewish state with the consent of the great powers. He saw the Jewish question as an international political question to be dealt with in the arena of international politics.

…Although at the time no one could have imagined it, Zionism led, only fifty years later, to the establishment of the independent State of Israel.

In his book The Jewish State, Herzl expanded on his earliest ideas: conversion and assimilation do not work, so Jews must either exist as (1) an isolated ethnic minority within host states — the condition of the diaspora — or (2) an ethnic group with its own state, a philosophy known as nationalism.

This leads back to the fundamental question: what is the cause of anti-Semitism? Some say that it is ethnic cruelty, others claim it is a legitimate response to the ethnic cruelty of Jews, but as Herzl found out and common sense dictates, people recognize that having a group of Other among them — whoever it is — is a form of slow genocide by outbreeding and therefore eventually lash out, leading to situations where whole villages unite to burn Jews alive in barns.

It is not surprising that as diversity thrashes a society to death, there will be outbursts which as mis-directed at the foreign population instead of diversity itself. Those who find themselves irked by diversity should heed this lesson, and instead of attack the Other, attack the policy of Othering the majority, namely diversity.

Back in 1864, as he was looking for ways to finish off the rebellious South that wanted to stay with the original interpretation of the American Constitution, President Abraham Lincoln signed an act to encourage immigration:

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to appoint a Commissioner of Immigration, who shall be subject to the direction of the Department of State, shall hold his office for four years, and shall receive a salary at the rate of $2,500 a year. The said Commissioner may employ not more than three clerks, of such grade as the Secretary of State shall designate, to be appointed by him, with the approval of the Secretary of State, and to hold their offices at his pleasure.

And what is the purpose of this act?

And be it further enacted; That no emigrant to the United States who shall arrive after the passage of this act shall be compulsively enrolled for military service during the existing insurrection, unless such emigrant shall voluntarily renounce under oath his allegiance to the country of his birth, and declare his intention to become a citizen of the United States.

Declare your intention to become a citizen and you can join the military. That is relevant because:

And be it further enacted, That all contracts that shall be made by emigrants to the United States in foreign countries, in conformity to regulations that may be established by the said Commissioner, whereby emigrants shall pledge the wages of their labor for a term not exceeding twelve months to repay the expenses of their emigration, shall be held to be valid in law

In your homeland, you can sign up for a one-year stint in the American military and have Uncle Sam pay to bring you over. Aha.

And be it further enacted, That there shall be established in the City of New-York an office to be known as the United States Emigrant Office; and there shall be appointed, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, an officer for said City, to be known as Superintendent of Immigration, at an annual salary of two thousand dollars; and the said Superintendent may employ a clerk of the first class; and such Superintendent shall, under the direction of the Commissioner of Immigration, make contracts with the different railroads and transportation companies of the United States for transportation tickets, to be furnished to such immigrants, and to be paid for by them, and shall, under such rules as may be prescribed by the Commissioner of Immigration, protect such immigrants from imposition and fraud, and shall furnish them such information and facilities as will enable them to proceed in the cheapest and most expeditious manner to the place of their destination.

Government will help relocate them…

APPROVED, July 4,1864.

…and it goes into law on a symbolic date.

Lincoln was fighting a long war against the South, and he wanted to crush them permanently, and could think of no better method than importing an army, then settling it in the conquered lands, so that he could break up the ethnic populations there. As Plato predicted, importing foreigners was a method of staying in power and also, crushing the population and making them subservient.

We tend to think of violent genocide as occurring at the hands of jackbooted thugs from one extremist political movement or another. The reality is often more prosaic: goaded by the pains of diversity, locals take it upon themselves to remove the Other, as happened in the formerly Russian-occupied Polish village of Jedwabne:

After being controlled by Russia for two years, Jedwabne, a small town in northeastern Poland, was captured by Germany on June 22, 1941. One of the first questions the Poles asked the Nazis, their new rulers, was if it was permitted to kill the Jews.

Gross writes that Jedwabne’s mayor agreed to help facilitate a massacre and that Poles from local villages came in to watch and celebrate the event as a holiday. About half the men of Jedwabne’s 1,600 Catholic community participated in torturing Jedwabne’s 1,600 member Jewish community, corralling them into a barn, which was then set ablaze.

In future times, people may see genocide and democide as the complex monsters that they are: driven not so much by political reality but by day-to-day frustrations and the tendency of different groups to behave in different ways, causing resentment. In many Russian-occupied areas, the natives identified Jews with the Communist party, in part because so many Jews were Communists:

While in 1934 38.5% of the top officials in the NKVD were Jews, this number was decreased to 31.9% in July 1937, 3.9% in September 1938 and 3.5% in January 1940.

This may simply reflect cultural differences: for most of the world, Communism is a tempting ideology, although traditional European cultures have resisted it, and so members of foreign groups would be more prone to join those parties. In addition, as minority groups, they cannot identify with the majority and so are drawn to anti-majoritarian politics such as socialism and its parent, egalitarianism.

Every marbled crayfish, known as a marmorkreb in German, is female — and they reproduce by cloning themselves. Frank Lyko, a biologist at the German Cancer Research Center, first heard about the marbled crayfish from a hobbyist aquarium owner, who picked up some “Texas crayfish” at a pet shop in 1995. They were strikingly large, and they laid enormous batches of eggs — hundreds, in a single go. Soon, the New York Timesreports, the hobbyist was beset with so many crayfish he was giving them away to his friends. And soon after that, marmorkrebs were showing up in pet stores upon Europe.

There was something very strange about these crayfish. They were all female, and they all laid hundreds of eggs without mating. These eggs, in turn, hatched into hundreds more females — with each one growing up fully able to reproduce by herself. In 2003, scientists sequenced their DNA and confirmed what many owners already believed to be the case: Each baby crayfish was a clone of its mother, and they were filling Europe’s fishtanks at alarming speed. Just 25 years ago, the marbled crayfish did not exist at all. Now, they can be found in the wild by the millions in Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Croatia, the Ukraine, Japan, and Madagascar.

Invasive species, like generalists or people after too much civilization, are simpler and therefore adapt more easily to a new place, at first. Over time their lack of specialization causes them to become more specialized, and they branch off into local species, but first, they have a much easier time of reproducing and displacing any native species that compete with them.

The same is true of government-sponsored immigration. The newcomers have fewer concerns about upholding the civilization and maintaining it, and only need to follow a basic model of feeding and reproducing. Over time, they displace the natives, who then pass into genetic history and are forgotten.

Some Western academics, politicians and media commentators believe Beijing may be winning that war when it comes to its overseas students – that rather than bringing Chinese youth towards a more politically liberal outlook, study in the West may instead be arousing greater nationalism and disdain for host countries, and in the process, be ushering in the Communist Party’s eyes, ears and hostile approach to free speech onto Western campuses.

…Han says that since coming to the US, he has been disappointed by American uninterest in understanding, or even listening to, views like these. Growing up in China, he explains, despite government propaganda, he came to see the US as a beacon of freedom, liberalism and open-mindedness. “But after a lot of people come here, they realise it’s not like that,” he says. “If you’re Chinese, when people talk about politics and democracy, you’ll always be targeted […] They try to put us under one very radical label, like, ‘Chinese people are lovers of dictatorships,’ things like that. At times, it’s very aggressive.”

…In many ways, interactions like these play into the Communist Party’s patriotic education campaign, which Chinese students are subjected to growing up. Instituted in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen uprising, the curriculum began emphasising Chinese nationalism and the country’s 5,000 years of greatness that were interrupted by imperialistic atrocities inflicted by the West and Japan during a “century of humiliation” (1839-1949).

Westerners have never known a world apart from diversity, democracy, equality, and tolerance. We pride ourselves in having fought two world wars for “freedom” and see it as a bedrock of our civilization. While Chinese feel that Americans are biased against Chinese, they are also experiencing how the rhetoric of equality becomes a cause in itself that necessarily excludes those with national pride.

Much as people in the Soviet Union were unaware of any other way of life until they saw information about America and Western Europe, Americans are unaware of how our mania for individual freedom makes us the enemies of any who want to keep their national cultures. Only recently has that begun changing with the rise of identity politics, which causes Americans to experience what these Chinese students have undergone.

Although the scientists tell you not to rely on anecdotal data, there is a certain role for stories. These show us the arc of events from distant causes through results and then aftermath. Often they are symbolic, meaning that we can derive a great deal of understanding from seeing one event this way. In fact, history and literature are based on that notion.

This week, Poland is struggling to come to terms with genocide. Specifically, it is trying to accept its own role not as a government, but as a people, in murdering Jews. The most shocking and also most revealing story about this is from a little village that developed its own final solution in a story that could come straight from Hollywood:

By the time the sun set on July 10, 1941, all 1,600 of Jedwabne’s Jews had been killed — shot, bludgeoned, knifed, and drowned, some tortured first — the last 340 of them locked in a barn and burned alive. Similar horrors occurred in other nearby villages, not by German occupiers, although certainly with their approval.

Driving all of the town’s Jews into a barn and burning it seems to be a trope that appears multiple times. It probably reflects how one would deal with a plague of zombies, rats, or alien attackers. It enables a straight clean-up in a symbolic way, since fire is associated with permanence and cleansing. It slams shut one chapter of history and opens another.

This shows us the nature of genocide. It is not caused solely by government action; rather, it arises from resentment. Whether right or wrong, Poles perceived Jews to be associated with nepotism, organized crime, and Communism. That would be consistent with the immigrant group working toward its own supremacy, which is what always happens with diversity.

Diversity naturally causes genocide because each ethnic/religious group acts in its own interests only. This means that it seeks to dominate other before it can be dominated. That in turn causes friction, especially as smaller groups engage in passive aggressive activity because they do not have the numbers for outright conflict. Majority versus minority results.

In the case of Europe, the tragedy of the Holocaust came about because everyone was too oblivious to note that diversity is paradoxical and will result in a massive conflict at some point. Thinking themselves clever, they denied the association between Jews and Communism (quoting (this source), itself associated with organized crime, but the ordinary people did not, and when given an excuse, took their revenge.

In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a “carnival of mass murder,” “fantasy of purges”, and “essianism of evil.” Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

As those who seek to avoid genocide ever again, our focus targets avoiding the pattern of events that sets up the conditions for genocide more than vainly crusading against genocide itself, like trying to ban any other human impulse. When the conditions are right, genocide appears like fire in a locked room, and humans shrug and seem helpless to stop it, although they easily could have stopped its genesis.

At Genocide Report, we thrive on scientific research. However, just as when shopping for used cars, you have to choose carefully. Most research is sponsored and reflects either (1) the needs of those paying or (2) a desire to say something that flatters or interests the audience, in a process that makes science into entertainment.

At this point we at the BMJ thought that we would change direction dramatically and begin to open up the process. We hoped that increasing the accountability would improve the quality of review. We began by conducting a randomized trial of open review (meaning that the authors but not readers knew the identity of the reviewers) against traditional review. It had no effect on the quality of reviewers’ opinions. They were neither better nor worse. We went ahead and introduced the system routinely on ethical grounds: such important judgements should be open and acountable unless there were compelling reasons why they could not be—and there were not.

Our next step was to conduct a trial of our current open system against a system whereby every document associated with peer review, together with the names of everybody involved, was posted on the BMJ’s website when the paper was published. Once again this intervention had no effect on the quality of the opinion. We thus planned to make posting peer review documents the next stage in opening up our peer review process, but that has not yet happened—partly because the results of the trial have not yet been published and partly because this step required various technical developments.

The final step was, in my mind, to open up the whole process and conduct it in real time on the web in front of the eyes of anybody interested. Peer review would then be transformed from a black box into an open scientific discourse.

In other words, peer review — a closed forum — is less effective than an open forum. This leads us to wonder why anyone would choose peer review unless their goal was to limit criticism. Among those who are counterparts in a profession, the primary self-interest burden consists of wanting to advance the profession itself, making people less critical.

This is consistent with what one famous survey of peer review found, which is that most findings are not reproducible or otherwise demonstrate scientists rejecting non-conformity data so that they can find facts to fit a theory, not a theory to fit all the facts:

The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.

Peer review functions as a bias and self-interest amplifier because it limits criticism to those with interests outside of the results themselves; people like to advance their careers, and they do so by generating interest per the nature of a utilitarian system such as ours, so the incentive for them is to approve of research on the basis of funding or popularity.

It’s something to think about as you read through the myriad of studies out there.

Ecosystems provide a model for complex causality. They also explain human interactions, since within our species we create something similar to ecosystems. New research suggests that, like complex chaotic systems tend to be, ecosystems involve a fragile balance of many equal parts contributing to one another, and even small disruptions can have vast consequences for ecosystems:

New research from Binghamton University, State University of New York reveals that interactions between relatively small organisms are crucial to mutualistic relationships in an ecosystem dominated by much larger organisms, including trees and elephants.

Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Kirsten Prior, along with Todd Palmer from the University of Florida, studied the symbiotic interaction between the whistling thorn acacia tree (the dominant tree in the East African savanna) and the ants that inhabit them. The ants benefit from the tree by getting housing and sugar-rich nectar, and the tree benefits because the ants protect it from large herbivores such as elephants. Using observational studies and experiments, the researchers discovered that a third partner, scale insects, are the most important resource affecting ant colony size and activity, as well as their effective defense against predators. The honeydew produced by the insects is a consistent source of sugar for the ants, providing them with a source of nutrients during prolonged dry seasons when nectar from the tree is scarce.

This suggests that human effects on the environment will be vastly amplified, even if they target only a small part of the ecosystem. The ants depend on the scales, the trees depend on the ants, and the elephants depend on the trees; instead of being linearly causal, this forms a pattern, where is any element is missing, the pattern breaks.

Human ecosystems take on a similar role. A real estate developer owns a shopping center; lawyers, accountants, and staff depend on that; store owners rent, and pay employees, but also depend on customers, and also other businesses across town for competition. Distributors bring products. Poor people get given old products, paychecks buy new products, and taxes pay for services.

When we look at human ecosystems in this light, we see how centralization makes them fragile despite reducing the number of elements. A natural ecosystem can fail gracefully if interrupted; a centralized system will march on like a zombie, causing externalized damage instead of rebalancing itself.